Charlie Brooker Q&A: the drug of tech has us hooked. What's the side-effect?

Wired.co.uk: Moving on the second episode, The Waldo
Moment, in which an animated blue bear is entered into a
bi-election, where did the idea for that come from?

CB: That came about quite a while ago when Chris Morris and I
were doing Nathan Barley and we had the idea of what if someone put
up an MP for an election which was like the band, Gorillaz. What if
someone put up a sort of animated mascot for election?

And then just thinking through the logistics of that was quite
amusing. You know, the fact that actually, suddenly you realise
it's got all sorts of advantages over a real person, because it's
almost like a robot, it can never be wrong, really. It's like Bugs
Bunny, or something. You don't really care whether it's Mel Blanc
or whoever took over Bugs Bunny's voice after Mel Blanc, you just
like Bugs Bunny. So it's a scandal-proof politician. Then
strangely, more recently, you think it's an advantage is it's not
human, because politicians don't seem particularly normal -- that's
sort of part of the problem I think, isn't it? People don't think
of politicians as a regular person. It then follows that you'd be
more prepared to vote for someone who wasn't pretending to be a
real person, if you see what I mean.

Wired.co.uk: Were there any specific politicians you had
in mind?

CB: I was thinking more of Boris Johnson. With Boris Johnson you
don't think of him as a politician oddly. You think of him as a
media personality, because he's a comic character. He's basically
Homer Simpson. That makes him strangely bullet-proof. So when he
fucks up, which he seems to do on purpose sometimes, it just makes
him more popular.

Wired.co.uk: He manages this image of a buffoon, doesn't
he?

CB: Yeah. People don't think about what he represents
politically, A lot of people do, but equally a lot of people don't.
They just like him. "Oh, Boris is a legend." It's infuriating if
you're posing politically, you know.

Wired.co.uk: Were you inspired by the guy who dressed as
a penguin and beat the Lib Dems in Scotland?

CB: Partly. The mayor of Iceland is another one. He's a stand-up
comic, and he was on a platform where he said he didn't know
anything about politics -- and he won. The penguin thing I think
happened… We were already going to do this episode when that
happened. That just sort of fed into it, we just thought, "Yep,
well, there you go."

Wired.co.uk: Another element of the episode is that the
voice behind Waldo is reluctant to get dragged into politics -- he
isn't interested. Is that a reflection of yourself?

It's certainly something I can relate to. I wouldn't say I'm
very politically astute or motivated. I'm broadly left-ish, but,
beyond that, I find it very hard to get very, very, very worked up,
and very specifically worked up for a great length of time. I think
I'm neither clever or stupid enough to be politically tribal. I
find it tiresome very quickly. And I think, because I, sort of,
write in the Guardian, people assume I'm very, very right
on, and take everything very seriously indeed, and I sort of
couldn't be arsed.

Wired.co.uk: So we would never see you on, say,
Question Time?

CB: I don't think I have the absolute cast iron certainty to sit
there debating a political position for hours and hours and hours
on end. I just don't. And equally I think it's moronic to just, you
know, clutch hold of your point of view, and not listen to anything
else, to the other side. Then you end up with a polarisation you
get in American politics. My nightmare, my idea my idea of an
absolute nightmare, is finding myself on Question
Time.

Wired.co.uk: Details on the third episode, White
Bear, are pretty sketchy. Could you explain the concept behind
that?

CB: It starts out with a woman waking up and 90 percent of the
population are just filming stuff and not intervening. The
remaining 10 percent are divided between victims and those that
have decided they can do what they like and go around causing
sadistic havoc -- which everyone else just films."

Wired.co.uk: And what informed that idea?

CB: A few things. The footage coming out of Libya this year was
the first times I've seen tourists in a war zone. From the news
reports, you'd see burnt out tanks and then someone filming it on
an iPhone or something. And then when Gadaffi's body was put on
display, people were turning up and there's a particularly ghoulish
shot I saw in one report where the camera man put his camera down
so you got the dead corpse's POV and it was all people leaning in
with phones for a souvenir snap. It was like something from
Dawn of the Dead except they're not feasting on the body,
they're snapping images of it.

It got me thinking: if you were making the Wicker Man
now, they'd all be filming it on the phone, wouldn't they? They'd
all be standing around at the end with their iPhones out while the
pyre goes up. It's creepy.

Comments

Great interview, love Black Mirror. Loved the paragraph about people seeming to orchestrate their lives to how they'll appear on Facebook. I've been pretty sure for a while now that a large percentage of a crowd at a sports or entertainment event are simply there to post on Facebook\Twitter that they're there. They actually have little interest in the event itself.

Ben Maher

Feb 11th 2013

Spot on about Facebook posturing. I found myself drifting into that a couple of years ago and beat a hasty retreat. Haven't been Fb since. Living a life is infinitely preferable to performing for "friends".

Jah Carthorse

Feb 11th 2013

Could it be that anyone capable of operating a mobile phone becomes a full fathom closer to an understanding of what Nietzsche meant when he said 'God is Dead'. Technology could dismantle religion, one of the most ancient, if decrepid, pillars of society. How can we be ready for that?

DG McWarren

Feb 11th 2013

I just watched the first episode it was spot on! I wonder if Charlie Brooker has ever read Future Shock its pretty old now as it was written in the sixties. I hate to think what my resurrected self would look like there would be a lot of pictures of me off my face on offmyfacebook. I am glad I deleted my account.I think the reason why Black Mirror stuff works so well is because it's not inconceivable, its not Space 1999.Also it doesn't see technology as a fix for a situation. A dead spouse is a bit different from the usual Sci-Fi series techno fix.

TC

Feb 12th 2013

"I remember I was changing to one phone from another, and going through my old contact details, and so I was having to delete duplicate numbers to make room, and up came the name of someone who died, and... it felt hard to delete the name. Do you feel like you're being disrespectful in some way? And there's something quite interesting about that."

Yes, absolutely. I still have my dad's number on my mobile, I won't delete it. Even though it's probably someone else's number by now.

Peter Davies

Feb 12th 2013

what was the make of mobile phone used in black mirror on monday 11 february 2013..

nick

Feb 12th 2013

Great interview. Absolutely loved the first series. Really excited to watch this new one.